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Iowa, Pigs, Microchips, and Founding Silicon Valley

Noyce, also known as “The Mayor of Silicon Valley”, was credited with the
invention of the microchip, cofounding Fairchild
Semiconductor and Intel. Together with Andy Grove and Gordon Moore,
they created the culture and economic force that Silicon Valley
became.

Personal Significance

Besides the obvious reason of wanting to read more about Noyce because he set
the foundation for my career of choice, I was also interested because he was
born in Iowa like myself.

It may seem insignificant but there’s something fantastic when reading about an
incredible figure that came from a similar upbringing. We both lived in small
towns that were separated by only a three hour drive and half a century in time.

The Story

To set the stage, this story took place when Robert Noyce was still an undergrad
living in Iowa attending Grinnell College.

Here’s the story which starts on page 21:

Every spring and fall, each hall hosted a party. In their zeal to create the
most spectacular party – the better the celebration, the larger the pool of
potential dates – residents often enhanced the décor with a few bales of hay
or a stack of lumber “borrowed” from unsuspecting farmers or townfolk.

Noyce lived in Clark Hall, which decided upon a Hawaiian luau theme for its
spring house party a few weeks before the end of his junior year. Since Noyce
knew the town of Grinnell especially well, he was assigned the task of
liberating a young pig to be roasted upon a realistic looking spit.

[Noyce and his partner in crime] walked across the golf course behind the
campus, grabbed a suckling pig, and ran with it back to Clark Hall. His
housemates decided to butcher the piglet in a third-floor shower. A
frantically squealing animal, intoxicated young men with knives – the ruckus
was such that students all over campus immediately knew something untoward was
happening in Clark Hall. The administration, however, did not hear about it
until the next day, when Noyce and his housemate repented and returned to the
farm with an offer to pay for the pig, whose absence had not yet been noticed.

It quickly became apparent that Noyce had not chosen a good farm to target.
The farmer was the mayor of Grinnell, a no-nonsense man given to motivating
his constituents through mild intimidation.

Noyce’s previous exploits […] had been dismissed as boys-will-be-boys
tomfoolery. Stealing a pig was a different matter entirely. It crossed the
line Noyce had skirted throughout his high school years, for as the letter the
dean sent home to Ralph and Harriet Noyce explained, “In the agricultural
state of Iowa, stealing a domestic animal is a felony which carries a minimum
penalty of a year in prison and a fine of one thousand dollars.” A prize pig
could easily sell for $1,000, nearly three times Noyce’s annual college
tuition.

Grant Gale [Noyce’s physics professor] and Grinnell College president Stevens
were in a frenzy. Even without a criminal conviction, expulsion alone would
have meant the end of the boys’ education. In 1948 no school would have
accepted a student expelled from another, and Gale in particular could not
bear the prospect of “losing Bob.” The two college representatives, both
longtime residents of Grinnell and friends of the Noyces, brokered a
compromise in which the college would compensate the farmer for his pig, and
no charges would be pressed. The boys would be allowed to finish the few
remaining days of their junior year but were suspended for the first semester
of their senior year.

A Sound of Thunder

There are an infinite number of butterflies that can change history. This one
stuck out at me because it is so Iowan, yet ties together two completely
different parts of American history: the agrarian one and the current
technological one.

It’s probably safe to say that if Robert Noyce hadn’t graduated from Grinnell
College, went to graduate school at MIT, then to work with William
Shockley with the knowledge and expertise that he had in transistors,
that Silicon Valley either would have been delayed or at least it would look
different than it does today.

I loved this story and the implication it could have had on the future if a grumpy
mayor had gotten his way. It’s a quirky little part of history that reminded me
of technology, Silicon Valley, and the state that I never felt apart of yet
still love.

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